Critical organizational challenges in delivering business value from IT: in search of the independent variable

The literature is filled with examples of IT projects that disappointed their sponsors on at least one measure of success. Managers today frequently go beyond the traditional project success measures – on-time, in-budget and meeting the scope of requirements - to embrace measures of the actual business benefits and the factors that deliver real business value. This paper is the third in a series of published papers that explore the challenges and opportunities facing organisations in deriving value from IT. Previous papers have explored issues around hybrid value models. This paper focuses on the search, identification and analysis of the independent variables that affect an organisation’s ability to extract value from IT. The paper draws together existing published work in the area with the results of field work conducted with CIOs of organisations in Lebanon. It proposes a framework that will assist managers to understand the complexities and interactions of independent variables that contributing to creation of IT value.